When I am ready to go, time to go fishing, she says, “Don’t forget to take some KIeenex.”
“What?” I ask, startled because I have been fishing for over a third of a century and Kleenex has not played a part in my fishing.
“Take some Kleenex with you.”
“What?”
I am definitely on the defensive, trying to deal with a brand-new aspect of fishing, something that had never crossed my mind before.
“You might sneeze.”
I think about it.
She is right.
Harmonica High
At odd moments like a brief bird, a sudden and enchanting obsession has flown into my mind and sat there for a while in the branches of my intelligence staring at me with a happy expression on its face and then flown away to return again for short visits later on. It always keeps coming back.
In other words: Harmonica High!
I daydream about a high school where everybody plays the harmonica: the students, the teachers, the principal, the janitor and the cook in the cafeteria.
Everybody has their own harmonica playing away from the time school opens until it closes. Harmonica High is a happy school where the only subject taught is playing the harmonica, and after school the students leave, taking with them harmonica homework.
Harmonica High doesn’t have a football team, a basketball team or a baseball team. They have harmonica teams that eagerly accept all challengers and never lose.
On the first day of school every September the incoming freshmen are given harmonicas and on the last day of school the graduating seniors get to keep them because the harmonicas are their diplomas.
There are beautiful green trees that grow around Harmonica High and from September until June there’s always a harmonica breeze in the leaves and you can hear the school from a mile away.
It’s a different concept of education that can only be described as Harmonica High.
Winter Vacation
Driving to town; the graves have turned to powdered wind and swirl gently across the road in front of us, but it’s nothing to be afraid of. It’s just a typical Montana winter day passing the cemetery whose only punctuation are bunches of plastic flowers sticking out of the snow.
The cemetery is one of the modern kind without tombstones or crosses. Designed for efficiency like a refrigerator, it has flat metal markers planted in the ground, so the only evidence of the graves is the plastic flowers and powdered wind blowing off the graves and caressing the road. A wind down from the mountains has allowed the graves to escape their solemn moorings.
Driving by: I think the graves are almost frolicking, glad to be free of their anchors, ports of entry, sailing schedules and silent cargo.
The graves are free this winter day, happy.
The Purpose
There is no reason for the telephone to be ringing in the middle of the night on a Sunday and to keep ringing.
The coffee shop is very closed.
The place does not sell coffee by the cup but by the pound, so there’s nobody sitting in there drinking coffee who needs a telephone call.
It is a place where they roast beans and sell them that way or ground to your desire, what you want a cup of coffee to do, what you expect from the beans. Maybe you like Shakespeare. Somebody else might care for Laurel and Hardy.
But the telephone keeps ringing.
Nobody’s inside except for the coffee roasting machinery which looks as if its actual purpose is something medieval that has nothing to do with roasting coffee beans, something ninth century and up to no good.
Nearby are silent sacks of beans waiting to be roasted. They come from South America and Africa, places like that, faraway, mysterious, but not as mysterious as the telephone ringing. The shop has been closed since 6 p.m.
Saturday.
It is now 2 a.m.
Sunday.
The telephone continues ringing.
Who is on the other end of the line? What are they thinking as they listen to the telephone ring in an empty coffee shop where it will not be answered until Monday at 8 a.m.? Are they sitting or standing while the telephone rings? Is it a man or a woman?
At least, we know one thing: they’ve found something to do.
The Irrevocable Sadness of
Her Thank You
She won’t escape. I won’t let her escape. I don’t want her lost forever because frankly I am one of the few people on this planet who gives a damn about her other than her friends and family if she has any.
I am the only American from a land of 218,000,000 Americans who cares about her. Nobody from the Soviet Union or China or Norway or France cares
…or the entire continent of Africa.
I was waiting at Harajuku Station for the Yamanote Line train to take me home to Shinjuku. The platform faced a lush green hillside: deep green grass with lots of bushes and trees, as always a pleasant sight here in Tokyo.
I didn’t notice her waiting for the train on the platform with me, though I’m certain she was there, probably standing right beside me, and that is why I am writing this story.
The Yamanote train came.
It’s green, too, but not lush, almost tropical like the hill beside the station. The train is sort of metallically worn out. The train is faded like an old man’s dreams of long ago springs when he was perhaps even young and all he had in front of him is behind him now.
We got on the train.
All the seats were occupied and we had to stand and then I noticed her standing beside me because she was tall for a Japanese woman, maybe 5-7. She was wearing a simple white dress and there was a very calm, almost serene feeling of sadness about her.
Her height and sadness captured my attention and for the six or seven minutes that it takes to get to Shinjuku, she completely possessed my mind and now permanently occupies an important place there as these words bear witness.
At the next stop a man sitting in front of me got up and the seat was vacant. I could feel her waiting for me to sit down, but I didn’t I just stood there waiting for her to sit down. There was no one else standing near us, so it was obvious that I was giving the seat to her.
I was thinking to her: Please sit down. I want you to have the seat. She continued standing beside me, staring at the empty seat.
I was just about to point at the seat and say in Japanese “dozo” which means please, when a man sitting next to the empty seat slid over, taking it and then offering her his seat and she sat down in his seat, but she turned to me as she sat down and said “thank you” to me in English. All of this took maybe twenty seconds from the time the seat in front of me was vacated and the woman was sitting down in the seat next to it.
This complicated little life ballet movement started my mind ringing like a sunken bell at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean during a great earthquake tearing cracks in the ocean floor, starting a tidal wave headed toward the nearest shore, maybe thousands of miles away: India.
The bell was ringing with the irrevocable sadness of her thank you. I had never heard two words spoken so sadly before. Though the earthquake of their first utterance is gone now, I am still in the power of its hundreds of aftershocks.
Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, after shocking over and over again in my mind, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.
I watched her sitting there for the few minutes until Shinjuku Station. She took out a book and started reading it. I couldn’t tell what kind of book it was. I don’t know if it was philosophy or a cheap romance. I have no idea of the quality of her intelligence, but her reading the book gave me the opportunity to look at her openly without making her feel uncomfortable.
She never looked up from the book.
She was wearing a simple white dress, which I think was not very expensive. I don’t think that it cost very much money at all. The design was starkly plain and the material was modest in thr
ead count and quality. The dress was not fashionably plain. It was really plain.
She was wearing very cheap, white plastic shoes that looked as if they had come from the bargain bin of a shoe store.
She was wearing faded pink socks. They made me feel sad. I had never looked at a pair of socks before and felt sad, but these socks made me feel very sad, though that sadness was only 1,000,000th the sadness of her thank you. Those socks were the happiest day of my entire life compared to her thank you.
The only jewelry she was wearing was a little red plastic ring. It looked like something you’d get in a box of Cracker Jacks.
She had to have had a purse to take the book out of because she wasn’t carrying the book when she sat down and there were no pockets in her dress, but I can’t remember anything about the purse. Perhaps, this was all that I could take.
Every living system has its limits.
Her purse was beyond the limits of my life.
About her age and appearance, as I said earlier, she was about 5-7, tall for a Japanese woman, and she was young and sad. She could have been anywhere between 18 and 32. It’s hard to tell a Japanese woman’s age.
She was young and sad, going to where I will never know, still sitting there on the train, reading a book when I got oft at Shinjuku Station, with her thank you like a ghost forever ringing in my mind.
No Hunting
Without Permission
October 21, 1978: Yesterday I didn’t do anything. It was like a play written tor a weedy vacant lot where a theater would be built one hundred years after I am dead performed by actors whose great grandparents haven’t even been born yet. If I were keeping a diary, yesterday’s entry would have gone something like this:
Dear Diary, I put up a no hunting sign today because tomorrow is the first day of hunting season and I don’t want some out of state hunters driving a station wagon with Louisiana license plates to stop and shoot a moose in my back yard.
I also went to a party. I was in a shitty off-angle wrong mood and said the same five boring sentences to forty different, totally unsuspecting and innocent people. It took me three hours to get around to everybody and there were very long pauses between sentences.
One sentence was an incoherent comment about the State of the Union. I substituted an obscure California weather pattern in place of a traditional Montana weather pattern to use as a metaphor about inflation.
What I said made absolutely no sense whatsoever and when I finished nobody asked me to elaborate. A few people said that they needed some more wine and excused themselves to go get some, though I could see that they still had plenty of wine left in their glasses.
I also told everybody that I had seen a moose in my back yard, right outside the kitchen window. Then I did not give any more details. I just stood there staring at them while they waited patiently for me to continue talking about the moose, but that was it.
A little old lady told me that she had to go to the toilet. Later on during the party every time I was in her vicinity, she immediately started talking desperately to the closest person.
A man I told my moose story to said, “Was that the same moose you told me about yesterday?” I looked a little shocked and then said, “Yes.” The shocked expression slowly changed into one of serene bewilderment.
I think my mind is going. It is changing into a cranial junkyard. I have a huge pile of rusty tin cans the size of Mount Everest and about a million old cars that are going nowhere except between my ears.
I stayed at the party for three hours, though it seemed closer to a light-year of one-sentence moose stories.
Then I went home and watched Fantasy Island on television. As a sort of laststand nervous spiritual pickup, I called a friend in California on the telephone during a commercial. We had a very low-keyed conversation during the commercial. He was not really that interested in talking to me.
He was more interested in doing something else.
As we struggled through the conversation, like quicksand, I wondered what the first thing he would do after I hung up. Maybe he would pour himself a stiff drink or he would call somebody interesting on the telephone and tell them how boring I had become.
At one point toward the end of our thousand-mile little chat, I said, “Well, I’ve just been fishing and writing. I’ve written seven little short stories this week.”
“Nobody eares,” my friend said. And he was right.
I started to tell him that I had seen a moose in my back yard but I changed my mind. I would save it for another time. I did not want to use up my best material right away. You’ve got to think of the future.
OPEN
Once she owned a Chinese restaurant and she worked very hard to get it. I think she spent her whole life earning the money. The location had not been a restaurant before, so she had to start from the very beginning and create a restaurant from a place that had been an Italian men’s clothing store for years with a clientele that was exclusively old men. The store finally closed when all its customers died.
Then the woman came along and made it into a Chinese restaurant. She replaced somber dark suits with fried rice and chow mein.
She was a small middle-aged Chinese woman who had once been very good looking, probably beautiful. She decorated the restaurant herself. It was a comfortable little world that reflected the values of the Chinese lower middle-class. There were bright and cheerful Chinese lanterns and inexpensive scrolls that had birds painted on them and little glass knickknacks from Hong Kong.
She had to build the restaurant from the very beginning, including lowering the ceiling and panelling the walls and carpeting the floor. There was also, and this is a big also, putting in the kitchen and creating two bathrooms. None of that is cheap.
She put her life’s savings into the restaurant and hoped for the best, probably prayed for the best. Unfortunately, it was not to come her way. Who knows why a restaurant fails? She had good food at reasonable prices and a good location with lots of foot traffic, but people just didn’t want to eat there.
I went there a couple of times a week and became friends with her. She was a very nice woman. I slowly watched her restaurant fade away. Often when I ate there, there were only two or three other people in the restaurant. Sometimes there were none.
After a while she took to looking at the door a lot. She sat at an empty table, surrounded by empty tables and watched the door, waiting for customers that never came. She would talk to me about it. “I can’t understand it,” she would say. “This is a good restaurant. There are a lot of people walking by. I don’t understand.”
I didn’t understand either and when I ate there, I gradually became a shadow of her, watching the door, hoping for customers.
She put up a huge sign in the front window that said OPEN. By then it was too late, nothing could help. I went away to Japan for a few months. When I came back the restaurant was closed. She had run out of time, staring at the front door while it grew cobwebs.
I didn’t see her again for about two years and then I bumped into her one day on the street. We said our hellos and she asked me how I was and I said, “Fine,” and she told me that she was fine. “You know I lost the restaurant,” she said.
Then she turned and pointed her hand down the street toward a neon sign two blocks away that jutted out, breaking the anonymity of the block. The sign told us that the Adams and White Mortuary was located there.
“I’ve been working for Adams and White since the restaurant failed,” she said, her voice was almost desperate and suddenly she seemed very small like a frightened child, just waking up from a nightmare and trying to talk about it while it was still so vivid that the child couldn’t tell the difference between it and reality.
Spiders Are in the House
It is autumn. Spiders are in the house. They have come in from the cold. They want to spend the winter in here. I don’t blame them. It’s cold out there. I like spiders and welcome them. They’re OK in my book. I’ve always
liked spiders, even when I was a child. I was afraid of other things, like my playmates, but I wasn’t afraid of spiders.
Why?
I don’t know: just because. Maybe I was a spider in another life. Maybe I wasn’t. Who cares? There are spiders living comfortably in my house while the wind howls outside. They aren’t bothering anybody. It I were a fly, I’d have second thoughts but I’m not, so I don’t.
…nice spiders protected from the wind.
Very Good Dead Friends
One day in his life he realized that he had more very good dead friends than he had living ones. When he first realized this, he spent an afternoon turning thousands of people in his mind like pages in the telephone book to see if he was right.
He was, and he didn’t know how to feel about it. At first he felt sad. Then the sadness slowly turned into feeling nothing at all and that felt better, like not being aware of the wind blowing on a very windy day.
Your mind someplace else,
No wind there.
What Are You Going to Do
with 390 Photographs
of Christmas Trees?
I don’t know. But it seemed like the thing to do in that first week in January 1967, and I got two other people to join me. One of them wants to remain anonymous, and that’s all right.
I think we were still in shock over President Kennedy’s assassination. Perhaps that had something to do with all those photographs of Christmas trees.
The Christmas of 1963 looked terrible, illuminated by all the flags in America hanging at halt-mast week after week in December like a tunnel of mourning.
I was living by myself in a very strange apartment where I was taking care of an aviary for some people who were in Mexico. I fed the birds every day and changed their water and had a little vacuum cleaner to tidy up the aviary when it was needed.
I ate dinner by myself 0n Christmas day. I had some hot dogs and beans and drank a bottle of rum with Coca-Cola. It was a lonesome Christmas and President Kennedy’s murder was almost like one of those birds that I had to feed every day.
The Tokyo-Montana Express Page 3